Object scrambling in Dutch Broca's aphasia

This study focuses on the production of sentences in which objects have been moved without a change in the order of the thematic roles. In Dutch, the basic word order is subject-adverb-object-verb. The object can be moved over the adverb; this is called object scrambling. The difference between the two word orders is pragmatic in nature: in the basic word order the focus is on the object, in the scrambled order, the focus is on the adverb. The aim of the present study is to evaluate if production of constructions with moved objects is impaired in Broca's aphasia and if so, whether that is for syntactic or pragmatic reasons. The results show that for individuals with Broca's aphasia, sentences with the scrambled word order are more difficult to produce than sentences with the basic word order, even if the scrambled order results in a pragmatically more acceptable sentence. This falsifies several theories of production in Broca's aphasia and shows an interesting parallel to the performance on comprehension tasks. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.